Feasability Studies

Thanks for those links Michael, I will check those out!
Just going back to when it would be prudent to prepare or commission a FS; do you prepare a FS for every development you do, or just the larger ones? (I would like to know if you feel it necessary to go through the process for a 2-4 unit/villa development or is it necessary only for larger projects). Would the banks view an application for funding more favorably if a FS is submitted when applying for a loan? How much would we expect to pay for someone to prepare a FS on our behalf? We project manage all our own construction so would you still recommend another PM for our first development? We do have the support of our local building inspector who has encouraged us to jump in. Julie

Thanks heaps Michael! I really appreciate your time and advice. The question regarding PM’s wasn’t intended to diminish the role of the PM but because where I live I would doubt that there are any. Only one architect up here is Uni qualified as far as I’m aware. Some of the architect/drafting firms in town offer this service but as I know how often Daryl has to visit them to explain to them that something they have drawn is unbuildable; I cannot imagine they would manage a project better than we could ourselves. We are 6 hours from Melb and 4 hours from Adelaide so importing a PM would be a serious financial cost and this would reduce our ability to compete in the market place with the many other local builders who also don’t use them. So I was sort of trying to ascertain whether they perform additional duties to what we would normally perform in the construction of a house in order to justify the cost. If they just handle the planning side of things then our building inspector has a planning expert on his staff to handle that and we just get the bill when the planning is approved. Kind Regards Julie

Hi Michael
I understand what you are saying but it sounds like you are presuming that we build set plans when we build a house. We are custom builders so every house we have built is unique/different; we have never built the same plan twice. If what you are saying is correct then, most custom builders (as opposed to the large companies with their own designs) who build architecturally designed homes are (for all intents and purposes) project managers; the difference for us will be that instead of building 3 unique homes/villas in three different locations for 3 seperate clients, we will be building 3 unique homes/villas in the one location for ourselves. It also could be that maybe in the major cities there a builders that specialize in the seperate stages of construction whereas in regional areas where the amount of work is smaller all builders run the job from start to finish. The only stage in Sunraysia that seems to be consistently subbied out is concreting, whereas we do all of that ourselves as well. Thankyou for your help Michael. It is much appreciated.[exhappy]. I feel confident now that we can more than handle a small scale development ourselves. We tend to agree with the comment about working for architects. We think trade experience is what seperate great architects from the ones that don’t understand what can, and cannot be built. Some just draw it in anyway and hope that someone can come up with answer to make it work.

Julie Fisher
Daryl Fisher Homes